Chapter 1
Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime
I’ve never driven a moving truck before, but I drive this one for twelve hours, Indiana to New York, sobbing off and on the whole way. I listen to Beck’s version of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” on repeat. The sky is gray and it spits rain all day, like there’s a rain cloud following me east.
By the time I pull up in front of my parents’ building on Fifth Avenue, opposite the park, the sky is thundery and dark, too dark for an evening in June. My parents meet me under the green awning and hug me in happy greeting. If they notice my blotchy, tear-stained face, they don’t mention it. If they wonder why, when I say I’m so glad to be home, I instantly burst into tears, they don’t ask.
The super finds a couple of guys to move my stuff into the library, and Mom and Dad feed me dinner while the guys bring it all in. I take a shower and wash away last night’s sex, and then my parents and I sit on the living room couch and celebrate my homecoming by binge-watching Gilmore Girls, which was one of my favorite shows when I was little.
And then I go to bed alone. I lie there, wondering what Charles is doing, how he feels, how he felt when he woke up and I wasn’t there.
The swamping shame of sneaking out like that is too much. I curl up in a ball, teeth gritted, and try to soothe myself by making lists in my head of the many valuable things I’ve learned recently:
• How you feel about a person doesn’t necessarily match the kind of relationship you can have with them.
• When you and your partner laugh while you’re fucking, you can feel the laughter inside your body.
• If a baby monkey’s mother starts abusively rejecting the baby, it will abandon all its friends and obsessively try to make its mother love it again.
I cry myself to sleep.
I wake up, cry a little more, go for a run, take a nap, eat dinner with my parents and watch a movie with them, and then cry myself to sleep again.
This is most of how I spend my month at home before I leave for medical school.
At my parents’ suggestion, I start attending the drop-in ballet classes for adults at Joffrey a few times a week. They think the discipline and the community will do me good. They’re right. I rip the shanks out of some old, dead pointe shoes and stop eating sugar and kick my own ass three nights a week, and it keeps my bleeding heart tethered to the rest of my body. I enjoy being in a group of “adults.” Which is apparently what I am now.
And every night, for a month, I lie in bed, staring at my Alan Turing poster—“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”—and I make lists in my head, to remind myself of all the important things I’m learning:
• The death of hope is like the death of a parent, the permanent loss of the place you would return to when life is at its worst.
• When you sob until you can’t breathe, you don’t die, even though it feels like you might. All that happens is you stop sobbing and you start breathing.
• My mom is really, really, really fucking smart.
I knew that last one already, but about ten days into my cry/ run/nap/ballet/dinner/cry/sleep routine, she follows me into my room after we watch Groundhog Day, sits on the bed, and pats the spot next to her. “Tell me what’s going on, girl.”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, and she pats the bed again.
So I sit beside her and bunch my lips together against the trembling that they’ve learned to associate with lying in this bed: If on bed, then cry until asleep. Ugh.
“Charles,” I say, suppressing my tears. I stare at my hands.
“What did he do?”
“He didn’t—” I stop and hold my breath, and then whimper, “He just didn’t love me.” I feel like a six-year-old confessing that another kid at school didn’t want to be my friend.
She sighs heavily and brushes her hand softly over my hair. “Annabelle Frances Coffey.” She only uses my whole name when she’s about to say something she feels self-conscious about saying.
“Yeah.” I sniff.
“I’m only going to say this once. Are you really listening?”
“Yeah,” I huff into my knees.
“Your heart. Is too wise. To love someone. Who doesn’t deserve it. So either: He’s a superb human being who has earned your friendship. Or else you will stop loving him altogether, and soon. I don’t know which it is, but I know it’s one or the other. This thing you’re experiencing right now is the chaos as your heart decides whether to let go of the love or . . . hold on to it in a new way.”
I wipe my nose on my sleeve and try to breathe. I ask, “How do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
“How do you know my heart will figure out what to do?”
“That’s what hearts do, when you let them.”
I sigh and sniff again, and I believe her. “Okay.”
And she’s right. That’s what mine does.
Slowly, painfully, like a hand uncurling from a fist to an open palm, my heart opens up, exploring ways to hold Charles differently.
But.
I’m not out of the chaos yet when Margaret calls me, barely three weeks after I left Indiana, and says in an urgent voice, “I know the answer is probably no, but you’re my best friend and I have to ask: Can you fly to Indiana tomorrow to attend my wedding?”
“What?!”
“The district court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage today. We want to go get a license right away because you know that shit is going to be stopped within a matter of days.”
“Oh my god, yes! Oh my god!”
Margaret and Reshma pick me up at the airport the next morning and take me to Reshma’s moms’ house and we clean and decorate and cook and hug and laugh. I mow the lawn while Margaret and Reshma weed the flower beds, which seems to be mostly an excuse to roll around in the dirt, tickling each other. The moms are inside moving furniture around to create space and “flow.” They’re getting married too—a double wedding in the backyard—and I feel so, so lucky to be here with these amazing people on this amazing day.
I also feel like I’m a one-hour drive away from Charles. I don’t know if he’s coming, and I can’t bring myself to ask. I just do what I’m instructed to do, being as helpful as I can until it’s my turn to take a shower and put on a dress, and then I start meeting guests at the back fence. My job is to let people in without letting the dog out. (The dog has no interest in getting out. He’s a twelve-year-old bulldog with an underbite and casual attitude about licking his penis in public.)
Eventually Margaret’s and my research supervisor, Professor Smith—“Diana,” she insists—arrives with her husband. I hug her hello. She’s so pregnant I worry she might pop like a balloon if I squeeze her, but I hug her as hard as I dare.
“Hey, is Charles coming?” I ask casually. The impression I want to give is that this isn’t something I’ve been obsessing about more or less nonstop since Margaret called.
Professor Smith—Diana—looks at me suspiciously, but only says, “He’s here—we drove up together.”
“Oh.” Something cold drops into my stomach, even as my heart starts fluttering.
All of our heads turn back to the driveway, and there he is.